Tag / derek connolly

by Jaime Rebanal

“Pokémon: Detective Pikachu” Review: Bizarre Charms Don’t Reach Their Peak But Remain Entertaining

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It’s only fitting enough for me to preface this review by stating this, I have been a lifelong Pokémon fan since childhood. But the old animated films have never aged well, which always disappointed me as someone who had been sticking so closely with the series with every new game that were to come out, so it always left me wondering how these films could fare if they were to be done in live action. With a universe of this scope having so much potential for so many more stories to be done based around the wonders of the Pokémon themselves, a comedic noir made to show its inspiration from films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit wouldn’t even be a bad start. To say the least, they’ve already managed to get everything about what made a world uniting humans and Pokémon so wonderful right from the surface, but there’s nothing about the story being told in Pokémon: Detective Pikachu that really feels as if it’s using up all the most of what this world can offer. It’s certainly not a bad way to start, because watching this as someone who has been a lifelong fan of the games it already gave me the urge to find my old games once again – though something still feels missing elsewhere.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’s Subtitle Best Sums up the State of the Franchise

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If one already were to think that the previous Jurassic World film was bad enough, somehow Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom makes said film feel even less lamentable in retrospect. With the predecessor having built itself on cynically cashing in on what were the most memorable moments from the original Jurassic Park film, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom seems to go a complete 180 on its predecessor and somehow managed to leave behind something that was even worse. I was hoping that I could at least doubt that something much worse could come forth given the fact that this was directed by J. A. Bayona, and somehow I found myself deceived the moment I had come out. The idea of a director like Bayona offering his own take on the Jurassic Park franchise was one that almost seemed too good to be true and to say the least, my suspicions were only proven right.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Jurassic World Review: An Exercise in Cynically Racking up Nostalgia by Undermining Its Roots

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In the twenty five years since its release, Jurassic Park has still remained a staple for 1990’s cinema because of its innovative visual effects and to this day, it’s astonishing that it still happens to look every bit as beautiful as it does. But as the franchise had only grown to become as big as it did, the meaning behind Crichton’s original creation had slowly been fading away. Surely enough, it’s hard to deny that the original Jurassic Park still remains a spectacle for the eyes because of what it had taken in order to make you truly believe that you were seeing actual dinosaurs on the screen through the film’s innovative use of both computer-generated imagery and animatronics. But there comes a point to which one can only get too caught up by the image of the spectacle that Jurassic Park had set into place and Jurassic World only emphasizes that danger all the more, because it cynically exploits that nostalgia one would have had for the original film without ever finding its own way to carry itself through. It cynically boils down what Crichton would have wanted to say about the eventual spectacle of nature’s own ways only to what audiences would buy in as “dumb fun,” and to me, that never felt right – it just felt ugly.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Safety Not Guaranteed – Review

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Colin Trevorrow’s debut film Safety Not Guaranteed was a film I remember having enjoyed upon my first sighting of it, when I was going out of my way to seek out quirky independent films as a means of passing time. Coming back to it now after seeing what more had Colin Trevorrow become after the abysmal nostalgia-sucking experience of Jurassic World didn’t help any better, for what I’ve once seen in Safety Not Guaranteed now comes off as a stereotypical indie film just the way I see everything coming about. The quirky characters and equally quirky premise, starring actors who’ve already made names for themselves in other smaller films – this easily could be great. But after a long period of time having gone without seeing Safety Not Guaranteed only ever showed an incomplete film to my very own eyes, in the sense that it seems to build up to become so much more – and then suddenly everything just stops.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Kong: Skull Island – Review

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As a result of Kong: Skull Island, I think the best way to express how I felt having come out was that I wanted to give Gareth Edwards’s take on Godzilla more credit. While I already did walk out of the theater watching Godzilla with a rather disappointed look on my face, it seemed that Edwards had a better understanding of how to raise the stakes inside of a monster movie compared to Jordan Vogt-Roberts, another independent filmmaker who came up on Legendary Pictures’s end to expand their MonsterVerse. The idea already should have sounded exciting but to my surprise (and eventual disappointment), the final results of Kong: Skull Island were merely disposable as opposed to fun.

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